Not without reason, Dr Pearce speculates that the new film will amount to “Wormtongue’s revenge”, and will seek to impose homosexual/bisexual themes that have nothing to do with Tolkien’s life and work.

H&D is not a religious journal and we do not concern ourselves with questions of personal morality or the private lives of individuals.

However it is interesting to read Dr Pearce’s article in the context of last year’s speech by Marion Maréchal Le Pen (granddaughter of French National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen) to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), an event where H&D used to be represented before the usual suspects ensured that our editor Mark Cotterill was excluded from the USA!

Marion Maréchal (as she now likes to be known to avoid confusion with her aunt Marine Le Pen), presented a challenge to Anglo-American conservative assumptions, which for at least the past couple of centuries have tended to be based on individualism.

Denouncing what she termed the “reign of egoism”, she pointed out:

“Today, even children have now become merchandise. We hear now in the public debate, we have the right to order a child from a catalog, we have the right to rent a woman’s womb, we have the right to deprive a child of a mother or father. No you don’t! A child is not a ‘right’. Is this the freedom that we want? No. We don’t want this atomized world of individuals without gender, without fathers, without mothers, and without nation.”

One doesn’t have to be a Catholic – or even a Christian – to get their point, nor does one have to be a racial nationalist. These ideas would be familiar academically to anyone who has read the works of Max Weber or R.H. Tawney (the latter was an Anglo-Catholic socialist).

Tolkien of course was a lifelong Catholic, and one of the underlying themes of The Lord of the Rings is the rejection of selfish power-seeking in favour of traditional community values – the values of the Shire as opposed to the values of Mordor.

H&D readers will justifiably fear that such values will either be absent or treated with postmodern contempt in the forthcoming Tolkien film.